Joel Bleifuss is the editor of In These Times, where he has worked as an investigative reporter, columnist and editor since 1986. Bleifuss has had more stories on Project Censored’s annual list of the “10 Most Censored Stories” than any other journalist.

Joel is one of the first journalist to report on the dangers of sludge disposal as a fertilizer. We have links to some of the articles as well as including some with close association.

Former EPA head Christine Todd Whitman interrupted investigations into her agency's endorsement of sewage sludge as fertilizer, according to the former chief investigator of the EPA's National Ombudsman Office.

As the chief investigator for the EPA's National Ombudsman Office, Kaufman had a bird's eye view of how the public health and safety were routinely subordinated to corporate interests.

For more than six years, Hugh Kaufman has been battling the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), his employer for 37 years, with a whistleblower lawsuit. He has been aided by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a D.C.-based group that represents workers who expose corruption in agencies that oversee environmental quality and public health.http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3794/epa_on_trial/

Nancy Holt, a retired nurse from Mebane, N.C., is beset by mysterious neurological problems. She blames the cause of her illness on the multiple unknown toxicities of the sewage sludge that has been spread since 1991 on the fields across from her house as “fertilizer.”http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3688/

People who want to save the Earth from the ravages of global warming face a perennial problem: How do they translate their concerns into actions that will create real change?

One barrier standing in the way of meaningful action is fuzzy-headed thinking on the part of those truly concerned about global warming. So worried are these activists, that their solution to the climate change problem is to marshal legions of Americans to change light bulbs, buy a Prius, or do any other number of helpful, but, in the big picture, not too significant feel-good actions.http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3098/

Thirty More YearsBy Joel BleifussFebruary 6, 2007Back in 1976, when James Weinstein decided to move to Chicago to start In These Times, his inspiration was Appeal to Reason, a socialist weekly published out of Girard, Kansas, between 1895 and 1922. At its peak in 1912, the paper had 761,000 subscribers—including 38,000 in Oklahoma. When the Post Office banned its special issues, which had print runs in the millions, subscribers around the country, “the Appeal army,” circulated it by hand.

Appeal to Reason was founded at a time when American society confronted both the effects of the industrial revolution and the emergence of corporations as dominant players in national politics. In American cities the majority of citizens had little control over their own lives. The places they lived were unsanitary, the food they ate unsafe, the conditions of their work horrendous and their pay meager. Children were exploited for their labor. Women lacked the right to vote. Blacks, Chinese Americans and Indians suffered institutionalized racism and discrimination.http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3011/

The E. coli Free MarketThe E. Coli outbreak is caused by the deregulation and mass production of food by corporateagriculture’s economies of scale.November 23, 2006By Joel BleifussSince the advent of giant industrial enterprises in the late 19th century, corporate capitalism in the United States has been defined by its use of economies of scale to increase profits—profits further enhanced by the die-off of those businesses unable to compete.http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2893/

Their Patents or Your LifeBy Joel BleifussDecember 3, 2005Have you heard about that bird flu? The threatened pandemic, should it occur, will kill in a worst-case scenario 150 million people, including 7 million Americans. The resulting mountain of skulls would dwarf those piled up in all the wars of the 20th Century.

Yes, it’s scary stuff. People who research the virus say the question is when, not if, the pandemic will occur. And former Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson describes the avian flu as “a really huge bomb.” The flu kills about 50 percent of the people it infects by attacking the lungs and causing hemorrhage. Healthy young people, those with the strongest immune systems, are most at risk.http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2411/

Sewage sludge, the toxic byproduct of the nation’s sewage treatment facilities, continues to be spread across the American countryside as an EPA-defined form of fertilizer.

I first wrote about this pernicious form of land-based dumping in 1995. Since then a few things have changed on the sludge front. The Merriam-Webster dictionary now contains “biosolids,” the EPA and the waste treatment industry having convinced the editors that this was an actual word and not a PR firm’s attempt to linguistically detoxify “sludge.”http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/1454/